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The Finnish People's Delegation (Finnish : Suomen kansanvaltuuskunta, Swedish : Finska folkdelegationen) was the government of the Finnish Socialist Workers' Republic (Red Finland) created by a group of members in the Social Democratic Party of Finland during the Finnish Civil War from January to May 1918.
The Delegation was established as a rival to the Government of Finland and seized power in Helsinki at the start of the Civil War by supplanting Pehr Evind Svinhufvud's first senate and Parliament. It passed laws and enactments aspiring to a socialist reform of Finland as per the policy of the labor movement with support from the armed Red Guards. The Chair of the Delegation was the former Speaker of the Parliament Kullervo Manner. [1] The Central Workers' Council operated alongside the Delegation but its role in the Reds' administration was minor. Soviet Russia was the only nation to recognize the Delegation as the government of Finland and its main supporter in the Civil War. The Delegation moved from Helsinki to Viipuri in April, from where its members fled to Petrograd after the defeat of the Red Guards. [2]
The decision to start an armed revolution in Finland was initially made by Red Guards' leadership and by a branch split from Social Democratic Party of Finland (SDP) party committee on 23 January 1918, called "Finland's workers' executive committee", whose members represented the most radical wing of the labor movement[ citation needed ]. On the night of 27 January, the executive committee ordered the Red Guards to arrest members of the Senate led by Pehr Evind Svinhufvud, and a host of other leading capitalist politicians, including 33 members of Parliament. However, this failed completely, and the Red Guards' Supreme military staff postponed the coup by a day because of unfinished preparations, so the senators were informed of the arrest warrant through a prematurely issued public handout, and had time to hide.[ citation needed ] The assembling of Parliament on 28 January was blocked and a few members that turned up were arrested.
The Finnish People's Delegation was established on 28 January 1918 and it set to lead the revolt started on the same morning. The founding of the Delegation was announced on 29 January in the newspaper Työmies[ citation needed ] in a declaration that also named the delegates, and in which the fundamental objectives of the Red government were briefly explained. The Delegation already on its first day occupied the Senate House in Helsinki and established itself as the government of the Finnish Socialist Workers' Republic (Red Finland), an alternative socialist state to the pre-existing Finnish state.
The Red administration's first action was to discontinue all capitalist newspapers, already on 28 January in the capital, and over the next few days in other cities in Finland. On 2 February, the Delegation confirmed the "counterrevolutionary" press to be suspended "indefinitely". The suspension even applied to the right wing social democratic Työn Valta and Itä-Suomen Työmies newspapers. After this the only papers allowed to be published were the papers of the Social Democratic Party and the Christian labor movement. The Whites' Senate discontinued all social democratic papers correspondingly. In March, the Delegation's Postal and Announcement Department placed preventive censorship on the remaining papers' reporting on the military and foreign affairs.
On 2 February, the Delegation ordered the Red Guards to be maintained by the government, essentially placing them under its authority. In practice, the Delegation was later forced to confess that it could barely control the actions of the Red Guards, and reduced the number of military affairs cases it handled. The relationship between the Red Guards and the Delegation remained problematic throughout the war, as the Delegation regarded the Red Guards' actions to be arbitrary, and many guardsmen in turn saw the delegates as "parasites" who were estranged from the realities of the battlefront.
In its set of decrees, it published 45 statutes in all, and favoured concised and scant language. Most of the Delegation's time went into producing new legislation. It has been estimated that about two thirds of its written laws were reactions to acute administerial issues, and the rest aimed at ideological goals or increasing support. Particularly the laws passed on ideological grounds were modeled after the legislation produced by the Paris Commune of 1871 and also the October Revolution in neighboring Soviet Russia, but mostly after Finland's labor movement's previous programmes. The laws passed by the Delegation were announced in the newspaper Suomen Kansanvaltuuskunnan Tiedonantoja.
The delegation members were elected and given similar roles as ministers in a government: [3]
Seats on the Supreme Workers' Council were allocated by the People's Delegation as follows:
The People's Delegation drew up a new Constitution, [4] taking influences from the American and Swiss Constitution and ideas from the French Revolution. A referendum on the proposal was planned.
From March, a string of defeats had caused the Red Guards (and by extension the Delegation and Red Finland) to be increasingly pushed southeast into the Karelian Isthmus. In April, the Delegation fled from Helsinki to Viipuri, the fourth-largest city in Finland which was located close to the border with Russia. However, the Whites were descending on Viipuri and an attack on the city was imminent. On 23 April, the Delegation was effectively dissolved when almost all of its members fled to Russia. Oskari Tokoi fled to the United Kingdom and from there to United States. [2] The Red Guards that stayed to defend Viipuri, now without political leadership, branded them as traitors. The Delegation assembled for a session in Helsinki 89 times in all, and in Viipuri less than ten times.
Members of the Delegation were not included in the amnesty of Red Guards issued by the Finnish government in late 1918. They could face treason charges if they returned to Finland and, as a result, lived in exile for the remainder of their lives. Delegation members in Russia were soon repurposed by the Bolsheviks for activities related to Finland and other Finnic peoples, particularly in Soviet Karelia. They were involved in the establishment of the Communist Party of Finland (SKP), which was banned in Finland and operated underground. Delegation members served as the leadership of the SKP and controlled its activities in Finland from their exile in Russia. In the late 1930s, many surviving members were condemned and executed by the Soviets in the Great Purge.
The Finnish Civil War was a civil war in Finland in 1918 fought for the leadership and control of the country between White Finland and the Finnish Socialist Workers' Republic during the country's transition from a grand duchy ruled by the Russian Empire to a fully independent state. The clashes took place in the context of the national, political, and social turmoil caused by World War I in Europe. The war was fought between the Red Guards, led by a section of the Social Democratic Party, and the White Guards, conducted by the senate and those who opposed socialism with assistance late in the war by the German Imperial Army at the request of the Finnish civil government. The paramilitary Red Guards, which were composed of industrial and agrarian workers, controlled the cities and industrial centres of southern Finland. The paramilitary White Guards, which consisted of land owners and those in the middle and upper classes, controlled rural central and northern Finland, and were led by General C. G. E. Mannerheim.
Kyösti Kallio was a Finnish politician who served as the fourth president of Finland from 1937 to 1940. His presidency included leading the country through the Winter War; while he relinquished the post of commander-in-chief to Carl Gustaf Emil Mannerheim, he played a role as a spiritual leader. After the war, he became both the first President of Finland to resign and the only one to die in office, dying of a heart attack while returning home after submitting his resignation.
Pehr Evind Svinhufvud af Qvalstad was the third president of Finland from 1931 to 1937. Serving as a lawyer, judge, and politician in the Grand Duchy of Finland, which was at that time an autonomous state under the Russian Empire’s rule, Svinhufvud played a major role in the movement for Finnish independence. He was the one who presented the Declaration of Independence to the Parliament.
The Senate of Finland combined the functions of cabinet and supreme court in the Grand Duchy of Finland from 1816 to 1917 and in independent Finland from 1917 to 1918.
Antti Oskari Tokoi was a Finnish socialist who served as a leader of the Social Democratic Party of Finland. In 1917 Tokoi acted as a Chairman of the Senate of Finland and thus he was the world’s first social democratic leader of the government. During the short-lived Revolution of 1918, Tokoi participated as a leading figure in the revolutionary government. Tokoi later emigrated to the United States, where he served as the long-time editor of Raivaaja, the newspaper of the Finnish Socialist Federation.
The Red Guards were the paramilitary units of the labour movement in Finland during the early 1900s. The Red Guards formed the army of Red Finland and were one of the main belligerents of the Finnish Civil War in 1918.
The Finnish Socialist Workers' Republic (FSWR), more commonly referred to as Red Finland, was a self-proclaimed socialist state in Finland during the Finnish Civil War from January to May 1918.
Yrjö Elias Sirola was a Finnish socialist politician, writer, teacher, and newspaper editor. He was prominent as an elected official in Finland, as minister of foreign affairs in the 1918 Finnish Socialist Workers' Republic, a founder of the Communist Party of Finland, and as a functionary of the Communist International.
Kullervo Achilles Manner was a Finnish and Soviet politician. He was one of the leaders of the Finnish Socialist Workers' Republic.
Eero Haapalainen was a Finnish politician, trade unionist and journalist, who served as the commander-in-chief of the Red Guards from January to March 1918 during the Finnish Civil War.
Adolf Pietarinpoika Taimi was a Finnish-Soviet Bolshevik and a member of the People's Delegation during the Finnish Civil War. After the civil war Taimi fled to Soviet Russia where he was one of the founding members of the Communist Party of Finland.
Frans Evert Eloranta was a Finnish politician and a Member of the Parliament for the Social Democratic Party in 1908–1918. During the Finnish Civil War, Eloranta served as the Minister of Agriculture of the Finnish Socialist Workers' Republic. In March 1918, he was elected the commander-in-chief of the Red Guards as a member of the triumvirate with Eino Rahja and Adolf Taimi. After the war, Eloranta fled to the Soviet Russia, where he allegedly died in 1936.
The Whites, or White Finland, is the nickname used to refer to the refugee and provisional government following the October Revolution and those forces who fought for and under Pehr Evind Svinhufvud's first senate, who were opposed to the "Reds", or the Finnish Socialist Workers' Republic, during the Finnish Civil War or the 'Finnish War of Independence', as it is often called by the Whites, in 1918.
The Battle of Viipuri was a 1918 Finnish Civil War battle, fought 24–29 April between the Finnish Whites and the Finnish Reds in Viipuri. Together with the Battle of Tampere and Battle of Helsinki, it was one of the three major urban battles of the Finnish Civil War. The battle is also remembered because of its bloody aftermath, as the Whites executed up to 400 non-aligned military personnel and civilians of Russian and associated ethnicities.
This is a timeline of the Independence of Finland. Timeline starts from February Revolution and ends with membership of the League of Nations. Events take place in Saint Petersburg and Finland.
Herman Hurmevaara was a Finnish Social Democratic Party of Finland Member of Parliament. He was born in Kiuruvesi, and served in the Parliament of Finland from 1917 to 1919. In the 1920s, he lived in Sweden. In 1930, he was exiled from Sweden, and with his family he moved to the Soviet Union. During the Great Purge, Hurmevaara was arrested on charges of espionage and imprisoned on December 23, 1937. He was later sentenced to death and executed by firing squad in Petrozavodsk. After the death of Joseph Stalin, he was rehabilitated in 1956.
August Anselm Wesley was a Finnish journalist, trade unionist, and revolutionary who was the chief of the Red Guards general staff in the Finnish Civil War. He later served as a lieutenant in the British organized Murmansk Legion and the Estonian Army.
Events in the year 1917 in Finland.
Socialism in Finland is thought to stretch back to the latter half of the 19th century in the Grand Duchy of Finland, with the radicalization of the labour movement and increasing industrialization of Finland.
Matti Turkia was a Finnish newspaper editor, politician and member of the Parliament of Finland, the national legislature of Finland. A member of the Social Democratic Party (SDP), he represented Uusimaa Province between October 1930 and April 1945. He had previously represented Viipuri Province West from May 1907 to May 1909 and from February 1914 to April 1917. He was secretary of the SDP from 1906 to 1918.